Woman Held in Killing of Mother With Alzheimer’s

A Highland Park woman fatally stabbed her elderly mother in frustration Thursday because the dead woman suffered from advanced Alzheimer’s disease and had “made her daughter angry,” police said.

Barbara Fritsche, 60, dialed the 911 emergency telephone number at 2 p.m. and told police she had killed her 86-year-old mother, Anna Fritsche, at their Burwood Terrace home, Los Angeles Police Lt. Ron Young said. The victim’s brother, Paul Hamann, 89, was asleep in another part of the house when she was killed, investigators said.

Anna Fritsche was stabbed in the kitchen of the three-bedroom home with a butcher knife and died on the floor in the bathroom, Detective J.D. Friend said.

Lived Together

The two women lived in the small, hilltop house since 1959, said Patricia Meehan, a neighbor. Anna Fritsche had come to Meehan’s home each night for the last nine years and slept with her in the same bed, said Meehan, 56. For the last three years, Barbara Fritsche has also slept in a spare bedroom in Meehan’s home, the neighbor said.

Meehan said she and the other two women would eat dinner together every night and take walks together every day. She said Barbara Fritsche had become enraged over her mother’s incontinence and at the need to diaper her mother every day.

Weeping as she made the bed she shared with the woman she called Annie, Meehan pointed to boxes of diapers she said Anna Fritsche would wear and described sleepless nights when she and her high school friend Barbara would find that Anna Fritsche had wandered out of the house alone.

Meehan said that since her parents died, she has considered the mother and daughter family.

“When I sent her home with Barbara at noontime, Annie was all right,” Meehan said, turning over a pot roast she said she had cooked for the four to eat together. “Next thing I knew, the Fire Department was there, the police were there.

“I don’t know what to do. I got three baked potatoes in the oven. I don’t know who’s gonna eat the third one now.”

As Los Angeles County coroner’s officials carried the bloodstained body of Anna Fritsche out to a waiting truck, Paul Hamann sat quietly on a couch in Meehan’s house, cradling a glass of wine and staring into space. Meehan said police had told him that his sister was dead but that no one had yet told him how she died.

Barbara Fritsche is being held in Sybil Brand Institute without bail.